The Standing One and Helen

What the nations say is enough, he says, for the knowledge of the whole, to anyone who has ears to hear with. For the man who has tasted this fruit, he says, is not only himself left untouched by Circe’s power to turn men into beasts; using the power of that fruit he also reshapes those who have already been turned into beasts, stamps them afresh, and calls them back into that first character which was properly their own. And a man who is faithful, and loved by that sorceress, is discovered, he says, by means of that milk-white and divine fruit. [a]

In the same way the third book is Leviticus, which is smell, or breathing; for that whole book is about sacrifices and offerings. Now wherever there is a sacrifice, a certain fragrant smell rises from it through the incense, and smell is the test for that fragrance. Numbers, the fourth of the books, he calls taste, where speech is at work; for it is by speaking that everything is named, in the order of number. But Deuteronomy, he says, is written with a view to the touch of the child that has been formed. For just as touch takes hold of what the other senses have perceived, sums it up and confirms it, testing whether a thing is hard or hot or sticky or cold, so the fifth book of the law is a summing up of the four books written before it.

So all things that are unbegotten, he says, are in us potentially, not actually, like the art of grammar or of geometry. If, then, a man meets with the teaching that fits him, and with instruction, and what is bitter is turned into what is sweet — that is, the pikes into pruning hooks and the swords into plows — then what is begotten will not be chaff and wood for the fire, but fruit that is ripe and formed into the image, as I said, equal and like to the unbegotten and boundless power. But if it stays a tree only, producing no fruit, not formed into the image, it is wiped out. For the axe, he says, is somewhere near the roots of the tree. Every tree, he says, that does not produce good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

So according to Simon that blessed and imperishable thing is hidden in everyone potentially, not actually. This is he who stands, who stood, and who will stand: standing above, in the unbegotten power; having stood below, in the stream of the waters, begotten in an image; and about to stand above, beside the blessed boundless power, if he is formed into the image. For there are three, he says, who have stood; and unless there are three standing aeons, the begotten one is not set in order — the one who, according to them, is carried over the water and is remade in the likeness, a perfect heavenly being, falling short of the unbegotten power in no thought at all. That is what they mean when they say: I and you are one; you before me; I, what comes after you. This, he says, is one power, divided above and below, begetting itself, making itself grow, seeking itself, finding itself, being its own mother, its own father, its own sister, its own wife, its own daughter, its own son — mother, father, one — being the root of everything. [e]

And that the beginning of the coming to be of things begotten is from fire, he says, is to be understood in some such way as this. Of all things that have a coming to be, the beginning of the craving for that coming to be is from fire. That is why craving for changeable generation is called being set on fire. Fire is one, but it turns two turnings. For blood in the man, he says — warm and yellow, shaped like fire — is turned into seed, while in the woman this same blood is turned into milk. The turning of the male becomes generation, and the turning of the female becomes food for the child being born. This, he says, is the flaming sword that turned to guard the way to the tree of life.

For the blood is turned into seed and milk, and this power becomes mother and father: father of the things coming to be, and the growth of the things being fed — needing nothing, sufficient to itself. And the tree of life, he says, is guarded by the turning flaming sword, as we have said: it is the seventh power, the one that comes from itself, that holds all the powers, that lies at rest in the six powers. For if the flaming sword does not turn, that good tree will be destroyed and perish. But if it is turned into seed and milk, then the one who lies in these potentially, if he meets with the teaching that fits him and the place that is properly his, where the word is begotten, will begin as from the smallest spark and be made altogether great; he will grow, and will be a power boundless and unchangeable, equal and like to an age that does not change and no longer comes to be, on into the age that has no limit.

So by this line of reasoning Simon admittedly became a god to fools, just as that Libyan did, the one called Apsethus — begotten and able to suffer while he is only potential, but no longer able to suffer, though he came from what is begotten, once he has been formed into the image and, having become perfect, has come out from the first two powers, that is, from heaven and earth. Simon speaks about this openly in the Announcement, in these words: [i]

“To you, then, I say what I say, and I write what I write. This is the writing. There are two offshoots of all the aeons, having neither beginning nor end, from one root; and that root is a power, Silence, unseen and beyond grasp. One of the two appears from above: that is the great power, the Mind of the whole, which manages all things, and it is male. The other is from below: a great Intelligence, female, which brings all things to birth. From there, standing over against each other, they are joined as a pair, and they show the space between them: air beyond grasp, having neither beginning nor end. And in this air is a father who carries everything and feeds the things that have beginning and end.

“This is he who stands, who stood, and who will stand: a power both male and female, answering to the boundless power that existed before, which has neither beginning nor end and is alone in its oneness. For the Intelligence, coming forth from that oneness, became two. And he was one, for having her in himself he was alone; yet he was not first, though he existed before. But when he was made to appear to himself out of himself, he became second. And he was not called Father until she named him Father. So then, just as he brought himself forward by himself and made his own Intelligence appear to himself, in the same way the Intelligence, when she appeared, did not create; but seeing him, she hid the Father inside herself — that is, the power. And it is a power both male and female, and an Intelligence. That is why they stand over against one another, being one; for power is in no way different from intelligence. From what is above, power is found; from what is below, intelligence. So what appears from them, being one, is found to be two: a male-female having the female in itself. So Mind is in Intelligence — things separable from each other, which, being one, are found to be two.”

So Simon, having invented all this, not only mishandled the writings of Moses and made them mean whatever he wanted; he did the same with the poets. He turns the wooden horse into an allegory, and Helen with the torch, and a great many other things besides, carrying them over to what concerns himself and Intelligence, and making up a story about them. He said that this Intelligence was the lost sheep. She was always to be found among women, and by her beauty, which nothing could surpass, she threw the powers in the world into confusion; and that is why the Trojan war came about on her account. For this Intelligence lived in the Helen who was born at that time, and so, when all the ruling powers laid claim to her, faction and war broke out, and in the course of it she was shown to the nations. That, at any rate, is why Stesichorus, who had insulted her in his verses, was blinded, and why afterwards, when he changed his mind and wrote his songs of retraction, in which he praised her, he saw again. [m]

Her soul was moved from body to body by the angels and the powers below, who, he says, made the world; and later she stood on a rooftop in Tyre, a city of Phoenicia, and Simon came down and found her there. He said he had come chiefly in search of her, so that he might rescue her from her chains; and when he had bought her back he took her about with him, saying that she was the lost sheep and that he himself was the power over all things. But this heartless man, having fallen in love with the poor woman called Helen, bought her and kept her; and because he was ashamed before his disciples, he made up this tale.

Now those who become imitators of the deceiver — I mean Simon the sorcerer — do the same kind of things, and argue without reason that they must have intercourse with one another. They say: “All earth is earth, and it makes no difference where a man sows, as long as he sows.” They even congratulate themselves on this intercourse in common, saying that it is perfect love, and using the words “holy of holies” and “will be made holy.” For they are not mastered, they say, by what is reckoned to be evil, since they have been redeemed.

By redeeming Helen in this way, Simon provided salvation for men through the knowledge of himself. For the angels, he said, were managing the world badly, because they loved to rule; and so he came to set things right, changing his form and making himself like the rulers and the authorities and the angels, so that he appeared as a man as well, though he was not a man, and seemed to suffer in Judea though he did not suffer — appearing to the Jews as Son, in Samaria as Father, and among the rest of the nations as Holy Spirit. He let himself be called by whatever name people wished to call him. The prophets, he said, spoke their prophecies under the inspiration of the angels who made the world; and so those who have believed in Simon and Helen pay no attention to the prophets even now, and do whatever they want, as free men. For they say they are saved by his grace. Nothing deserves punishment, they say, even if a man does wrong, since a thing is not evil by nature but only because someone laid it down: “the angels who made the world,” he says, “laid down whatever they wanted, thinking by such words to enslave those who listened to them.” And they speak, again, of a loosing of the world, for the redemption of his own people.

His disciples, then, perform magical rites and incantations. They send love charms and spells, and the demons said to be senders of dreams, to trouble anyone they please; and they practice what are called attendant spirits. They have an image of Simon in the form of Zeus and one of Helen in the form of Athena, and they bow down to these, calling the one Lord and the other Lady. And if anyone among them sees the images and calls them by the names Simon or Helen, he is thrown out, as not knowing the mysteries. [s]

This Simon, who deceived many in Samaria by his sorceries, was refuted by the apostles and left under a curse, as it is written in the Acts. Afterwards he renounced the faith and set his hand to these practices, until, settling as far away as Rome, he ran up against the apostles; and Peter stood against him many times, since he was deceiving many by his sorceries. At the last he came to … and sat teaching under a plane tree. And in the end, when he was close to being exposed because he was taking so long, he said that if he were buried alive he would rise on the third day. So he ordered his disciples to dig a trench, and told them to bury him. They did what they were told; and he has stayed there to this day, for he was not the Christ.

This is the tale told by Simon, and it is from this that Valentinus took his starting points, calling them by other names. For Mind and Truth and Word and Life and Man and Church, the aeons of Valentinus, are admittedly the six roots of Simon: Mind and Intelligence, Voice and Name, Reasoning and Reflection. But since we think we have set out Simon’s myth-making at sufficient length, let us see what Valentinus says as well.

The heresy of Valentinus rests on a Pythagorean and Platonic foundation. For Plato, in the Timaeus, copies Pythagoras from beginning to end; and that is why Timaeus himself is his Pythagorean stranger. So it seems best to recall a few points of the Pythagorean and Platonic system first, and then to begin on what Valentinus says. Even though what Pythagoras and Plato held is contained in the books we have already worked through with so much labor, I shall not be acting unreasonably if I now recall in summary, for the reader, the chief of the opinions those men favored; and this will make what Valentinus held easy to recognize, by setting the two side by side and comparing like with like. The men of old took these things over from the Egyptians and taught them to the Greeks. Valentinus took them from those men, and then lied about having taken them from them, and tried to put together an opinion of his own. In fact he has only torn their teachings apart with names and numbers, called them by names of his own, and marked them off by measures, so as to construct a Greek heresy — varied, no doubt, but with nothing to hold it together, and having nothing to do with Christ. [x]

The beginning of the system Plato has in the Timaeus, then, is the wisdom of the Egyptians. For it was from there that Solon taught the Greeks the whole account of the world’s coming to be and its destruction, by some ancient and prophetic word, as Plato says — the Greeks being young children who knew no older teaching about the gods. So, in order that we may follow the arguments Valentinus laid down, I shall first set out what Pythagoras of Samos taught, along with that silence of his which the Greeks so celebrate; and after that, the things which Valentinus took from Pythagoras and Plato and, with great solemnity of language, assigns to Christ — and, before Christ, to the Father of the whole and to the Silence joined with the Father. [z]

Pythagoras, then, declared that the beginning of all things is the unbegotten monad, and that the dyad is begotten, and all the other numbers with it. He says the monad is the father of the dyad, and the dyad the mother of everything that is begotten — a begotten thing, mother of begotten things. And Zaratas, the teacher of Pythagoras, used to call the one a father and the two a mother. For the dyad has been begotten from the monad, according to Pythagoras; and the monad is male and first, the dyad female. And from the dyad, again, as Pythagoras says, come the triad and the numbers that follow, up to ten. For Pythagoras knows this one alone to be a perfect number — I mean the ten. Eleven and twelve are an addition to the ten and a going back over it; what is added is not the begetting of some other number. [aa]

He generates all solid bodies from things without body. For he says that the element and beginning of bodily and bodiless things alike is the point, which has no parts. From a point, he says, a line comes to be; and from a line, a surface; and a surface flowing out into depth stands, he says, as a solid body. That is why the Pythagoreans also have a certain thing they swear by: the agreement of the four elements. They swear like this:

The fourfold number is the beginning of natural and solid bodies, as the monad is of the things grasped by the mind. And they teach in this way that the fourfold number also begets the perfect number, as the monad does among the things grasped by the mind. If a man begins to count and says one, and adds two, and then likewise three, these will be six; and if to these he adds four besides, the whole will likewise be ten. For one, two, three and four make ten, the perfect number. In this way, he says, the fourfold number imitated in every respect the monad grasped by the mind, which was able to beget a perfect number.